The Most Washed SUV on the Templeogue Road
This is paradise, the only time that I truly own:
This solitary hour when I let my mind drift,
Stuck in the traffic, safe from her “must do” list
Pinned up in the kitchen with a fridge magnet.
Nobody notices me here as I hum favourite hits,
Fantasise about female motorists and recollect
The elation of struggling with straps, when girls
Let me undress them, frill by silky frill, on nights
When I was more constant than any Northern star,
When evenings brimmed with the possibilities
Of what fate might hold, what doors might open in bedsits,
Where kisses tasted of lipstick and Benson and Hedges.
Could I have then envisaged being captive in a car at dawn,
Content inside my prison, happy to be bullied and bossed,
Knowing that without my jailer I would be truly lost?
She controls time and motion until I strap on my seat belt
At eight a.m. or earlier if I invent reports of gridlock.
When I arrive home she’ll badger me out to the shed
That needs sorting, the lawn to be trimmed, on her list
Where life can be ticked off into an ordered happiness.
Sometimes when she bends at the sink I want to lift her dress
Like that afternoon in her father’s shed in her tennis skirt,
Only now she would tut and give me her “act your age” eyes.
I don’t want to be my age, I want to sit here and fantasise
About convent girls or curing cancer or scoring tries
With a packed crowd hysterical in the corner where I lie
Bruised and sore, but ready to hold the ball aloft
Amid jubilant team mates, with the Triple Crown won,
Cures found for blindness, malaria, middle-age disgruntlement,
The mystery unsolved of the burglar who stole the fridge magnet,
Struggles with bra clasps at seventeen, fishnet stocking worn
By a Cavan girl in a Rathgar flat, the illicit taste of woodbines,
A hand under the table in Zavargo’s Nite Club, mysterious rust
Affecting the tools in the shed, with even the lawn-mower bust,
The garden gone to pot, a power-cut and her whisper: “I’m scared,
Let’s go to bed by candlelight. With no other heat in our residence
We’ll have to burn my list to stay warm, unless you’ve other ways
To keep me warm, like on that afternoon I wore a tennis skirt,
And was correcting your pronunciation of ‘Duice’ when you grasped
Me tight about the waist in the shed amid Daddy’s potting plants.”
That sweetness to which I yielded everything, except my daily fix
Of simply staring at taillights here, with no boss to supervise
This off-duty hour when I truly exist – midway between my desk
And henpecked life – the hero in every tale, free to do as he likes.
- Dermot Bolger
This poster is part of NIGHT & DAY, an exhibition of poster poems by Dermot Bolger about everyday life in South
Dublin County, commissioned and presented by INCONTEXT3, South Dublin County Council’s Per Cent for Art
Scheme which is funded by the NRA and the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.
Having been first published as posters displayed in the community, Bolger’s poem sequence was then interlaced
with poems by other writers who live or work in South Dublin County to form the illustrated anthology
Night & Day: Twenty Four Hours in the Life of Dublin City, which is published by New Island/South Dublin
County Council. Bolger’s sequence was also published separately in his collection External Affairs. These posters
and the poems by other writers in Night & Day can be downloaded from www.Dermotbolger.com.
Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known poets, novelists and playwrights.
Designed and produced by Yellowstone Communications Design 670 4200.